A tale of two Chelseas

If ever you wanted a weekend of footballing contrasts, these last two days provided it amply, and from one single club, too. On Saturday, Emma Hayes’ relentless pursuit of success saw Chelsea secure a fourth straight Women’s Super League title. 24 hours later Chelsea’s senior men’s team brought the curtain down on a miserable season that couldn’t have ended soon enough. One Chelsea delivered a league and cup double, the other, a Premier League bottom-half finish - 12th place, their lowest position since 1994 and their worst points tally for 30 years. That’s the kind of form that would have otherwise led to relegation were it not for the even more anaemic performances of the eight teams below them. 

Now, before anyone throws the gender debate back at me, the essential comparison being made here is that one Chelsea is managed by a tactically astute head coach who, over the past 11 years, has built, maintained and enriched the team with a profound working relationship with her players, backed by investment in the best available talent. The other has, over the course of this last season, had four different managers, each charged with integrating an embarrassment of riches acquired by a £600 million supermarket trolley dash.

And there, again, is that word: “embarrassment”. It was infamously invoked by co-owner Todd Boehly after a particularly egregious home defeat to Brighton in April. While he wasn’t wrong - chewing out the team in the changing room - many Chelsea fans felt that Boehly should have undertaken some self-reflection before making such a comment, even though in a literal sense, the players he was laying into, bought for inflated fees and in some cases, paid inflated wages, have been embarrassing. All. Season. Long.

Was it their fault though? To be blunt, yes. Six-figure weekly remuneration should be enough to incentivise anyone to deliver. But that, though, takes an extremely simplistic view of the problem. The harsh reality is that there is a collective responsibility at Chelsea for the way this season has gone - from the highest echelon on down. I don’t wish to sound churlish about the Boehly-Clearlake Capital consortium who effectively saved the club, after Roman Abramovich was forced to sell up. But the way they went about running their new toy in the wake of their £2.5 billion takeover has fuelled a level of negativity towards them that took rival club owners like Manchester United’s Glazer family and Liverpool’s Fenway Sports Group years, not months, to establish.

It shouldn’t be forgotten, though, that the ensuing dysfunction only spread to the men’s half of Chelsea. After the Women’s FA Cup Final, Hayes herself reflected on how things had gone elsewhere in her organisation: “It will bug me if I don’t say this - I’m a football fan and I’ve watched how much my club has suffered this year. We’ve had ownership changes, the men’s team hasn’t been brilliant.” And she added: “Chelsea fans - this [FA Cup title] is for you. I hope we had a little bit of joy tonight. I hope we gave you something where you can smile about it this year. The whole club, owners included.”

According to media reports, Boehly is now believed to be taking a step back from day-to-day control. Since the takeover, and the splurge on players that he personally oversaw, the management structure has supposedly been strengthened, with the appointment of co-sporting directors Paul Winstanley and Laurence Stewart, amongst other senior figures. But according to some players there have been critical exits elsewhere, particularly in medical staff and members of the ‘pit crew’ that keep the highly tuned Formula 1 car that is a Premier League football team on the road. Frank Lampard (manager #4), installed as interim manager following manager #2 Graham Potter’s sacking in April has hinted at this: “Chelsea has been a big success for 20 years but at the moment we aren’t in that position,” he said early in his tenure. “In the time I’ve been here, it’s pretty evident and clear to see - behind the scenes, on the training ground - the reasons why.” Ever the PR man, his comments were far from cryptic.

It is, though, possible that problems at Chelsea have been even deeper seated. Dysfunction, in one form or another, has long been the stream flowing though the club. BT Sport took fans of a certain vintage back to the era of chairman Ken Bates earlier this year with the excellent documentary Pound Land: Battle Of The Bridge. It sourced the origin of Chelsea’s modern day state to the hubris that followed a brief flirtation with the big time in the early 1970s, which brought a couple of trophies and Raquel Welch to Stamford Bridge. The spiralling cost of building the stand I sit in to this day amid the ’70s economy almost bankrupted the club, which was then sold to Bates for a nominal pound, only for him to be forced into an existential battle with property developers threatening to flatten the ground completely and put Chelsea out of business.

With the developers soundly beaten, Bates then took on the arrival of Matthew Harding as a director and investor, creating another power struggle. Harding, though, paved the way for new investment, and with it Glenn Hoddle, followed by European elite players like Ruud Gullit, Gianluca Vialli and Gianfranco Zola (admittedly, nearing the end of their careers). A new Chelsea emerged, enjoying less profligate times in the then-new Premier League. A remarkable goal on the final day of the 2002-2003 season from Jesper Grönkjaer propelled Chelsea into the Champions League at Liverpool’s expense, and along came Abramovich with his bottomless cheque book, followed by 20 trophies in 19 years. And 13 managers.

Low levels of job security were always priced in to any managerial appointment in the Abramovich era. The Boehly-Clearlake takeover heralded talk of long-term projects and stability. Tell that to Thomas Tuchel (manager #1): having replaced Lampard in January 2021 - with the club on much the same trajectory as it has this season - Tuchel took the team to a Champions League final within four months and won it. He then masterminded a victory in the World Club Cup the following year…only to be fired just a month into the season now ending. So much for a new regime.

Before tackling the What Happened Next? chapter of this story, it is worth framing managerial turnover in the context of player arrivals and departures. Player power has led to the undermining of many of Chelsea’s managers in the modern era. They know that if their form goes or they fall out of favour, the worst that can happen is that their agent lands them a cushy berth somewhere else. Such players are hardly likely to respond to a vulnerable coach when results go against them. Which brings me to Graham Potter.

From the outset he was handed an impossible task. Despite a reputation for creating the perfect developmental culture at Brighton on a relatively modest budget, at Chelsea he was effectively the driver of a family hatchback suddenly handed the keys to a lurid, bonkers Lamborghini. Actually, 32 of them. At first, Potter’s appointment seemed like a sharp move: a young manager who’d developed an attractive manner of play on the South Coast. But, by the time of the World Cup, and the extended international break, Potter was expressing his relief at having some time to figure out what was going wrong.

Boehly’s spending, seemingly adding people the club didn’t know it needed but bought anyway without strengthening in the departments where the need was most acute, loaded the dice for Potter. As his international players returned from Qatar, and the January window opened with Chelsea doing even more business, Potter’s fate was sealed. Despite having several weeks to figure it out, results continued to be dismal, and yet Potter now had even more new players to work with. Disquiet in the Stamford Bridge stands became more audible. As January gave way to February, the #potterout movement proliferated and, by the time he was eventually fired in April, hostility had become substantial.

Following the brief one-match tenure of Potter’s assistant, Bruno Saltor (manager #3 - effectively, the Liz Truss appointment of the season), the club decided that it would take time to consider its next permanent appointment, bringing back Lampard for the final few weeks.

Let’s be very clear, this was no more than a PR sop towards fan toxicity, but as an exercise in appeasement, it didn’t work. For all. Of the eleven games Lampard was in charge of, eight were defeats.Although most Chelsea fans still revere Lampard the player, these few weeks have damaged his managerial brand, possibly irreparably. “If you ask me what I have learned in this short period,” he reflected ruefully after the abject 4-1 defeat to Manchester United at Old Trafford, “In terms of coaching, not so much. I’ve been in in this situation as a player when you have an interim after a change of manager. A lot of the plus-points you gain are about what the team is fighting for. Can you find that extra bit? And we haven’t found that as a collective. The results say so.”

With yesterday’s final whistle at Stamford Bridge, Lampard’s second spell as Chelsea manager came to a dismal end, albeit with a smidgen of pride restored by a 1-1 draw with Newcastle at Stamford Bridge. But it also heralded a new cycle of change. Financial Fair Play rules means the club will have to trim its senior squad. Step forward, then, Mauricio Pochettino, announced today as Chelsea’s new head coach, on a two-year contract.

The 51-year-old Argentinian’s appointment has been in the works for a long time. He was even considered by Abramovich when Lampard left in 2021, and again by the new owners when Tuchel was fired last September. So, has Chelsea finally got their man? No one knows. History has shown that it doesn’t matter whether a club makes a considered appointment or a knee-jerk, instinctive hire, nothing lasts forever, no matter how smiley the obligatory contract-signing/shirt-holding photo session.

Chelsea promised a “thorough” process to identify and appoint a permanent new manager following Potter’s sacking, but whatever technical requirements were on the shopping list in early April, the weeks since will have amped up the need to restore pride and cohesion to a team that has become a laughing stock amongst rival fans. That same tribalism informed some initial misgivings about Pochettino’s Tottenham connection (before that particular quadrant of the Twittersphere was rightly shut down by reminders of where Hoddle had played for 13 years before launching Chelsea’s supposedly continuing era of elite competition). 

The task Pochettino is facing is huge. First, he has to prune an enormous 32-player squad (so big there aren’t enough spaces in the Cobham changing room for everyone). There are plenty of candidates, and while the process won’t be pain-free, those who’ve looked increasingly ineffective, disinterested or unmotivated will be easier to live without.

Hopefully, what will be left from this exercise will be a smaller, younger and more ambitious squad, something Pochettino is historically well suited to developing. He’ll have a lot to work with. It’s been hard to gauge what Lampard’s selection strategy has been over the last few weeks and what clues that might provide as to what his successor will do, given that as Pochettino has conducted his own contract negotiations he is also believed to have informed the Chelsea hierarchy who he’d like to work with from the existing squad. 

Given his reputation for developing youth, that bodes well for young homegrown left back Lewis Hall. Still only 18, and clearly with a lot to learn, he has taken his opportunity well with Ben Chilwell and Marc Cucurella both out of action, with gutsy performances since Lampard played him in his final games in charge. Similarly Noni Madueke, the 21-year-old Englishman signed in January from PSV Eindhoven who has already shown himself to be far more interested in playing up the right wing than Hakim Zyech or Christian Pulisic have ever done. More puzzling is the development prospects for Carney Chukwuemeka, the 19-year-old midfielder signed from Aston Villa with great expectation, but whom Lampard appeared to keep at arms length. At the centre of midfield sits the Argentinian Enzo Fernández, bought in January for a staggering £106.8 million but, at 22 and a long-term contract, the kind of player Pochettino might build around.

He is also thought to be a fan of using homegrown talent, something Lampard, during his first spell in charge, made good use of, with Chelsea Academy graduates like Reece James, Tammy Abraham (now at Roma) and Fikayo Tamori (now at Milan). Unless sold in the domestic departures, Pochettino would do well to retain Conor Gallagher, another youth product. He will also want to call upon 20-year-old Levi Colwill, the central defender who joined Chelsea as a schoolboy and who has been getting regular football on loan at Brighton. Given that 39-year-old Thiago Silva can’t possibly go on forever, the thinking is that Colwill could be integrated into Chelsea’s backline (ideally, with Silva retained as a defensive coach to maximise his exhaustive experience).

Pochettino’s biggest headache, though, will be Mason Mount. At 24, and a Chelsea player since he was 8, he is the ideal figure the club needs and Pochettino wants. Personable, mature, and therefore a PR asset (making him captaincy material, with Azpiliqueta nearing the door), he is also about to enter the final year of his contract, with nothing yet agreed on a renewal despite months of speculation. For such an asset, Mount and Chelsea have been engaged in a weird, socially-distanced dance in recent weeks, with negotiations either progressing slowly or not at all. Pochettino might make a last-ditch attempt to persuade him to stay at his boyhood club, but with Manchester United and Liverpool circling, and interest from Arsenal, too, the prospect of cashing in on a player valued at around £55 million could be too tempting for the club to resist. After the Newcastle game yesterday, Mount was part of the team lap-of-honour at Stamford Bridge. To most watching on, it felt like farewell.

As it did when Ruben Loftus-Cheek, another youth product, was subsituted, giving an emotional wave to Stamford Bridge that appeared to confirm speculation that he’ll be off, possibly to AC Milan. Selling Mount, along with Loftus-Cheek, Trevoh Chalobah, Callum Hudson-Odoi and even Gallagher would not only make money, but as homegrown players balance out Financial Fair Play regulations. Other disposals will just save money, such as Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Kalidou Koulibaly, two of last summer’s inexplicable, and expensively reumunerated purchases. Whoever goes, it is understood that Chelsea will need to do their selling business before the end of June, when the transactions can be recorded in the club’s accounts for the season. That won’t rule out new players coming in (Leipzig’s Golden Boot-winning French striker Christopher Nkunku is believed to have already agreed a move to Chelsea this summer). 

Pochettino will need - and want - to work with a much smaller squad, comprising players with a shared hunger and a sense of team spirit that has, this season, been glaringly absent. If some rumours are to be believed, a lack of commitment from some players has combined to disastrous effect with a lack of confidence in other. A fundamental rebuild will, then, be essential. Not just in personnel, but in what motivates them. In that, there is a lot to learn from the season now ended. 

All seasons can seem overly long by May, but for us Chelsea fans, 2022-23 has felt endless. A touchline mini-fracas between Thomas Tuchel and Antonio Conte, when Spurs manager, now seems distant. As does the World Cup, with all of the culture war brouhaha it engendered. Another new era at Chelsea awaits, but fans used to trophies will have to wait longer before seeing another open-top bus parade on the Fulham Road. But it’s not a lost cause: Erik ten Hag effectively rebuilt Manchester United in a season, following a similar period of managerial turmoil. Mikel Arteta took Arsenal to almost the Premier League title this term, despite a particularly rocky start to his time as their manager. As long as Pochettino is allowed to get on with his work, and expectations are managed accordingly, who knows where Chelsea could end up?

While he is, though, something of a compromise, his appointment at the third time of asking is more of a marriage of convenience. “Everything at Chelsea fits,” wrote Spanish football expert Guillem Balague when Pochettino emerged as the most likely candidate for the job. “It is a young squad, a thriving academy coupled with a desire from the owners to bring youth through, a philosophy that is aggressive and dynamic with high pressure and loads of energy.”

Pochettino has also been out of a job for almost a year, since parting company with Paris Saint-Germain, evidently taking his time to find the right project. “He has taken a good look at himself and what he did wrong at the French club, what he could have done better and how he can avoid making similar mistakes at Chelsea,” Balague added. “He needs to have the energy to be able to mould players, know that the players are listening to him and have the authority to ensure that this is happening.”

He will need a degree of autonomy rarely granted Chelsea managers in the modern era. Fixing Chelsea will not be an overnight job. Patience - the sport’s most precious commodity - has never been abundant at this football club. There’s no suggestion that the cycle is about to be broken by Pochettino’s appointment, but with no European football next season and a gentler fixture list, he will have a bit more time and space to craft the squad in the way that he wants to. How long he gets to restore incoming traffic to the Stamford Bridge trophy room remains to be seen.

At the end of the day, no one knows. Day One of a new coach’s tenure always brims with hope, expectation and optimism. Until it goes wrong. That’s been the case with Chelsea forever (with, perhaps, the one exception of Rafa Benitez, who trolled everyone by winning the Europa League as interim head coach, despite being regarded as an inflammatory appointment). Pochettino does have a record of playing good football, at Espanyol, Southampton, Tottenham and PSG, and while he is certainly not held in the same regard as, say, a Guardiola, he has at least managed well with what he’s had at his disposal. Even Chelsea’s most jaded fans should remember that he came close to winning the Premier League twice - in 2016 and 2017 - with Spurs. Which makes you wonder what he would be capable of in SW6, assuming he can sort out the mess he’s inheriting. He is, to cite Balague, a “hungry manager” after a year away from day-to-day management. Let’s hope that hunger pays off.

Sweet birds of youth

Picture: Facebook/Chelsea FC

Many words have, over the decades, been expended on the involvement of English (and Scottish) clubs in European football. I’m neither an archivist or an inveterate Statto, so I won’t bore you with fancy-pants recollections of the giants of the game, past and present, and their exploits (although into that category you still must include Nottingham Forest and Leeds United, even if they’ve lost their way, domestically, since). European football nights have changed, somewhat, in the Champions League era, with its TV rights-hiked, inflationary stadium ticket racketeering, but I think to childhood TV broadcasts featuring the likes of Borussia Mönchengladbach and a Brian Moore TV commentary coming over a telephone line. It was rather exotic, wasn’t it? Players you’d never heard of and probably would never again, scoring wonder goals. Now, you see them once, and expect to see them again within the next transfer window at your own club. These were the days when “the Continent” seemed mystical: you could get away with subtle xenophobia about players with ‘amusing’ names in much the same way as Stuart Hall did during the Jeux Sans Frontières international stages of It’s A Knockout.

Having lived in continental Europe for the better part of two decades, travelling throughout for work and pleasure, some of the exoticism of foreign football has dissipated. Last night, however, I received a sharp reminder that such mystique still existed, when Chelsea entertained Bayern Munich at Stamford Bridge. Chelsea’s European history, in my conscious lifetime, has been something of a Curate’s Egg. For example, there was that Cup Winners Cup run in 1995, which took us to Club Brugge on a night when Glenn Hoddle was in charge and played David Rocastle up front on his own to no discernible impact. It was my first and only European away fixture experience, too and, now I think of it, it was quite surreal: dawn departure from the Fulham Road in what looked like a D-Day column of numbered buses (“Orange 5, Orange 5, Orange 5!!!”, we taunted Purple 7 at a convenience stop), being marched past overly aggressive Belgian riot police, their horses and their dogs, before heading back down the E40 to Calais and a return roughly 24 hours after we departed, suitably chastened by having lost to the single Gert Verheyen goal. Since then, Chelsea have motored through numerous managers of eclectic European origin, and have established themselves - questionably, in some people’s minds - as one of the European elite. Well, we did win it in 2012, in Munich, which I watched from my local pub in Paris. One of the best nights of my life. Period. Last night, Chelsea suspended that status as Bayern took revenge on 2012 and were punished 3-0 on home turf, leaving them without Jorginho and the red carded Marcus Alonso for the return leg. It’s unlikely that there will be a further round for the Blues, even if miracles have happened before.

Perhaps unusually, I’m quite sanguine about it. Head coach Frank Lampard might, as is his duty, be fuming (“They outclassed us in pretty much every department, so it was quite sobering,” he said afterwards), but Chelsea fans should be philosophical. Bayern were, frankly, scintillating, as they were in their 7-2 demolition of Spurs last Autumn. Chelsea are a work in progress. That’s not an excuse, but when you’re comprised of still-developing youngsters and veterans over 30 eying last payday-ahoy opportunities elsewhere, you don’t have to look too far for reasons. It’s just one of those things. Learn from it and move on. God knows what the reverse fixture will be like next month in Bavaria, but I sincerely hope that Bayern don’t take their foot off the pedal, even if the other foot is currently on the windpipe of my beloved football club. Sometimes you just want to see European class, even at your own expense. As I blogged on Sunday, Chelsea weren’t meant to get higher than the bottom half of the Premier League’s top ten this season, so as long as they remain focused on staying in next season’s European places, it will only serve their youngsters’ progress well.

That, still, won’t prevent the boo boys from having their say. The “#LampardOut” tweets are depressingly predictable, even if they come from a myopic minority. Some have even suggested that the club should never have discarded Maurizio Sarri, God help us (though in mitigation he did win a European trophy in his single season at Chelsea). Few football fans are suitably patient when it comes to their beloved clubs. Win handsomely one week and the insistence is that a consecutive win will follow. When it doesn’t, the grumbling breaks out. I’ve seen that this season at Chelsea. After that opening day disaster against Manchester United, things started to look up, and youngsters like Tammy Abraham, Mason Mount, Christian Pulicic and Fikayo Tomori were giving our jaded eyes hope that, maybe, this wouldn’t be a fallow season, after all. But that was delusional. These talented players have tremendous potential (and great prospect for the national side), but to expect them to just step into gear in their debut seasons in the Premier League is asking a lot. Even more so, in their European debuts. That’s not an excuse, just a statement of reality. What Frank Lampard and his coaching staff have to ensure, however, is that it doesn’t become an excuse for them, either. Lampard might be a club legend, rightly revered, even more so than his ‘Captain, Leader, Legend’ teammate John Terry, but that still doesn’t immunise him from Roman Abramovich’s all-seeing eye. Just look at the treatment of the late, great Ray Wilkins.

Taking last night’s Round-of-16 first leg tie into account, Lampard’s job is and shouldn’t be at risk. Genuinely, Chelsea have a golden opportunity to learn from the experience without recourse. Rarely does that happen in football, even rarer at Chelsea, but if Abramovich and his directors have any amount of common sense, they will treat this season in the correct context. Yes, the loss of Eden Hazard has been painful; yes, the FIFA transfer ban has been significantly restricting; yes, the need to draw on Academy players has been both challenge and opportunity. These aren’t excuses but unavoidable points of mitigation. Losing 3-0 at home to this Bayern Munich is nothing to be ashamed of, even if the goals came in a negative sequence that began with Jorginho’s needless booking. Chelsea had actually played quite well before that point, even if there were early signs of Bayern’s ruthlessness, and the class of Robert Lewandowski and the forgotten capabilities of former Arsenal player Serge Gnabry. It would, though, be remiss to just dismiss the defeat as a combination of unavoidable factors. Alonso - redeemed against Spurs on Saturday - let himself down with two equally avoidable bookings, while Jorginho’s discipline let him down by mouthing off to the French referee to receive a next-match suspension. Stupid. Abraham and Mount both showed their inexperience with wasted chances late on that could have restored some pride had they been properly converted, while Barkley’s inability to complete passes cost dearly. Things to work on? Of course. Things that might improve in the next leg? Unlikely. That’s just where Chelsea are. Like the marathon runner running out of puff, sometimes you can only give so much. These Chelsea youngsters, in particular, still have a lot to give, and in seasons to come will do so. For now, they are where they are. Playing Bayern Munich - already being talked up as European champions-elect - will only serve them well.

Frankie's back in town...

Picture: Chelsea FC

Finally. Frank Lampard is back. Chelsea Football Club’s all-time record goal scorer and now its 12th manager in 16 years. "One of the greatest players in our history during his long and illustrious career returns to Stamford Bridge having signed a three-year contract," trilled the club website. Whether he sees out those three years remains to be seen. But certainly at the signing of the managerial nuptials, ex-player and club renewed their vows: "Frank possesses fantastic knowledge and understanding of the club and last season, he demonstrated he is one of the most talented young coaches in the game," gushed Chelsea director Marina Granovskaia in a statement. "After 13 years with us as a player, where he became a club legend and our record goalscorer, we believe this is the perfect time for him to return and are delighted he has done so. We will do everything we can to ensure he has all the support required to be a huge success." No pressure, then.

Never has Chelsea appointed a manager (sorry, "head coach") with so much expectation on his shoulders. Or as much doubt. Twitter, that great touchstone of our time, was predictably binary on the news this morning. Comments from both Chelsea fans and the indifferent were split between the "It's too soon, I hope it doesn't end in tears" view and the "Welcome back Frank - you’re going to be a blinder" (though this being Twitter "your" was often the frequent spelling). Lampard is, at the end of the day, a big boy, and an intelligent one at that. Having seen ten managers come and go during his playing career at Chelsea, he will have seen for himself just how fast the revolving door ejects the dismissed and the failed. He will know what managing Roman Abramovich’s football team is all about, risks and all. But don’t forget, though, it’s a huge gamble for both parties.

Lampard’s appointment, delayed by yesterday's Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp outages (oh, how modern) comes after a month of speculation, rumour and conjecture. Will he? Would he? Would they? Why would they? The former midfielder is stepping into a lion's den only the bravest would enter, taking on only his second job in club management in only his second season in management itself. That first season, at Derby County, left the neutral (or, perhaps, the unromantic) unsure of whether Lampard has the chops...yet. But did Ruud Gullit and Gianluca Vialli have the chops when cuddly Ken Bates promoted them from the playing staff to become managers, winning the FA and League cups respectively? Now, granted, they didn’t last long, either, but longevity in post hasn’t  been a tradition at Chelsea for generations. In fact, in the Abramovich era, longevity probably hasn’t even entered the lexicon, just as long as the manager of the moment delivers Champions League football and maintains a strong challenge on the Premier League title. Even then, that’s not necessarily a guarantee of survival. Just ask Carlo Ancellotti, hired as the model of European managerial excellence, who won the league and cup double in his first season at Chelsea, but only achieved a second place domestically in his second and was fired in a corridor at Goodison Park after the final game of the season.

It is believed that Lampard has received assurances from Abramovich that he will be given time. That might sound empty, but with the club having to accept the two-window FIFA transfer ban, as well as the inevitable loss of Eden Hazard, such assurance represents tacit acceptance that it's time to live within means and make do. Not that with a squad largely unchanged from that which won the Premier League title under Antonio Conte just two seasons ago, plus the wealth of youth talent at its disposal, 'making do' will be a particular hardship. But it won't be plain sailing, either. For a start, Lampard will need to win over the core of the senior players. Coming in as a club legend might help, but Chelsea does have some dead wood in its midst. And the ban means that players like David Luiz and Willian, who'd otherwise offered a choice between a one-year contract (being over 30) and the door, need to be harnessed for what they can still bring. If they can.

Clearly, though, the big opportunity for Lampard is to score a few PR points with the home fans by playing Chelsea's youth prospects. Few, beyond Ruben Loftus-Cheek and Callum Hudson-Odoi, before they were injured towards the end of last season, have had a chance at the club. Chelsea's loan system has looked more like an exercise in husbandry, as the likes of Mason Mount, Fikayo Tomori and Tammy Abraham have been farmed out. Clearly, though, in the case of Mount and Tomori, their time under Lampard at Derby will serve them well. As will the arrival of Jody Morris, Lampard's assistant at Derby, who was drawn from the Chelsea academy with an impressive record. That record, by the way, should also be shared by Joe Edwards,  the 32-year-old youth coach at Chelsea who has played an unsung role in the incredible haul of trophies the club's academy teams have netted in recent years. Lampard's apparent appointment of Edwards to his coaching team is the clearest indication yet that the youth will get their turn. We shouldn't forget, either, that Lampard will also have at his disposal Christian Pulisic, the 20-year-old American "soccer sensation" bought from Borussia Dortmund in January for £58 million, who might well go some way to plug the considerable gap vacated by Hazard.

In his first comments as the new Chelsea manager, Lampard has at least given his younger charges the hope that, finally, they will get their chance at the club. "The path from the academy to the first team is important," the Evening Standard reports him as saying. "I will always have an eye on the academy. I was that young player a very long time ago and the one thing you want is the feeling that the road which divides the academy to the main building is a road you can cross. It has to be there for you. And I think that does come from the top. If young players are performing and they deserve it on merit, then they will be coming to train with us." Here is an oblique reference to rumours that Lampard is planning to integrate the first team with the club's Under-23 set-up, or at least remove some of the clear barriers that separated them (Maurizio Sarri is alleged to have not seen a single youth match during his sole season as club head coach).

"There is a lot of hard work for [the youth players] to do," Lampard added. "I don’t want it to look like an easy road. It is very tough, but I want to try and help them. I'm excited because playing here for so many years, seeing the work put into the academy and on all fronts, from the top, the investment into it and the desire to see it succeed, on the ground, the coaching staff, the people working in the academy trying to bring players through to the first team.

Speaking about Mount and Tomori in particular, Lampard cites their attitude. "You could see they had come through the academy here in how they held themselves, how they trained, their manners off the pitch. That’s what I want to see. I want to dangle the carrot. Can you work hard? Can you compete? Can you get in the team?".

There was a time, several years ago, when a young Frank Lampard had doubts cast over his prospects as a player. Famously, his father, Frank Sr., would drill him at West Ham's training ground, keeping him out after everyone else had gone back to the changing rooms. As a player, he had to put up with a lot, including the ludicrous "Fat Frank" jibes from opposition fans. One thing, though that made him stand out as a player and contributed to his record 221 goals for the club, was his attitude. Lampard has always come across as being somewhat driven, and it's what made him become such an integral part of that title-winning spine of players - along with Petr Čech (also now back at the club), John Terry and Didier Drogba - that made Chelsea an exciting delight to watch. That excitement disappeared in the denouements of Mourinho and Conte's tenures, and failed to even register under Sarri, even if the Italian managed to win both the Europa League and third place in the Premier League.

I know plenty of rival fans still regard Chelsea as arriviste. That's their prerogative. The unwritten rule is that you cheer on your side and boo everyone else. I'm always amused by the "where were you when you were shit?" taunts that come from the away end at most games at Stamford Bridge. Because I always reply, "right here!" (though technically I was right where they are, given that I stood in the Shed End when I first started going to games at the Bridge). Chelsea has come a long way since then, but Lampard today is benefitting from a revolution that began when Glenn Hoddle was poached from the newly promoted Swindon Town. In turn, he attracted bigger international names like Gullit, who in turn attracted Vialli (fresh from lifting the European Cup as Juventus skipper) and Gianfranco Zola. Admittedly, these players were reaching the end of their playing careers, but fans glossed over their ages and bought into the new glamour, finally abandoning the era of Mickey Droy and Ron Harris, and a perpetual lurching between divisions in front of pitiful crowds at home.

While the peak of Hoddle's achievement may have been a Cup Winner's Cup run in 1995 (earned on the back of that 4-0 tonking by Manchester United in the '94 FA Cup Final...), Gullit, his successor, took Chelsea back to Wembley in 1997 and the club's first major honours since a single league title in 1951. 22 years on, and with the not insignificant acquisition of the club by Abramovich, Chelsea can claim one Champions League, two Europa League, five Premier League, seven FA Cup and four League Cup titles in the modern era. Given that haul, Chelsea could, in a way, afford a fallow season or two if it gives a young, inexperienced but locally adored manager like Lampard the space to build a squad based on youthful talent. Yes, we crave success, and even under Mourinho were prepared to sacrifice style for moribund substance, but we also want entertainment. It’s what, ultimately, gets us out in all weathers on a Saturday afternoon rather than traipsing around shopping centres.

Both Gullit and Roberto Di Matteo - scorer of that 47th-second goal at Wembley in '97 - both believe that Lampard can thrive as Chelsea manager, with the Dutchman saying that his lack of experience should not be the disadvantage it might at first appear: "Look, he has done nothing yet as a coach," Gullit told Sky Sports. "[But] they gave me this opportunity as well and we won, so that [inexperience] has nothing to do with it." Di Matteo, Lampard's manager at Chelsea when they won the Champions League and FA Cup in 2012, says no one can predict outright whether the new head coach will succeed, but he'll never know unless he tries. "It's a great fit, but whether it's right now or not, only time can tell," the Italian told Sky. "You can't say it's too early, you have to give people a chance. He's got all the tools and it will make a lot of people happy if he is the next manager." And there's the key: "It will make a lot of people happy". Modern football, and certainly Chelsea, doesn’t do a great deal in this department. Chelsea has elicited plenty of WTF moments in recent years, with ill-advised appointments such as André Villas-Boas, Luis Filipe Scolari and Rafa Benitez (even if he landed the Europa League, his stock at Stamford Bridge was ocean-deep to begin with).

Not every ex-Chelsea name, however, is comfortable with Lampard becoming the boss so soon in his career. Former captain Dennis Wise told Sky Sports that the risks are significant: "From a playing point of view, from a personal point of view, everyone loves [Frank] at Chelsea. But he hasn’t been long in coaching and neither has Jody [Morris] so it slightly worries me a little bit, but if they get it I wish them all the luck, both of them. It’s going to be tough for him but fingers crossed they do the right thing for Chelsea and do well." This from Wise might be the glowing endorsement it looks. But he has a point: "At the end of the day, Chelsea are a Champions League team, they want to finish in the top four," he told Sky. "I think as Chelsea fans you want to be competing at the highest level and winning trophies."

Time will, of course, tell. Lampard certainly has his work cut out, whether it is repositioning N'Golo Kanté back into the seat of midfield, where he should have been last season, getting the best out of the ageing likes of Giroud, Pedro and Willian, integrating Pusilic and the academy stars while, hopefully, aiding the recoveries of Hudson-Odoi and Loftus-Cheek, while at the same time addressing the deficiencies that gave Sarri so much doubt about their viability. Taking the helicopter view, and with a pinch of optimism, these are, actually, quite exciting times at Chelsea. A little different, I grant you, but exciting none the less.